War's Risks Include Toll On The Values Of Training

WASHINGTON — The laws of armed conflict are drilled into the heads of soldiers and Marines almost from the moment they arrive at boot camp.

Before shipping off to war, they attend rigorous seminars about distinguishing friend from foe, and they are told of the severe penalties that await anybody who allows this distinction to blur.

It is extraordinary, then, that after a series of reports of brutal incidents against Iraqi civilians carried out by U.S. troops, the top ground commander in Iraq has ordered mandatory training for all coalition forces to "reflect on the values that separate us from our enemies."

Military experts say that the first principle of counterinsurgency warfare, and its greatest difficulty, is to separate enemy fighters from the local population from which they draw strength. But as details emerge about the killings of Iraqi civilians in Haditha and Hamandiyah, it seems increasingly clear that some U.S. troops have come to see the population itself as the enemy.

"In cases where you fail to defeat the insurgency, you sometimes adopt out of frustration increasingly ruthless methods to try to defeat the insurgents," said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a retired Army officer and a counterinsurgency expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research group that studies military issues.

Sometimes this frustration can manifest not in sheer brutality, but in the troops operating on a hair trigger, as seemed to happen last week in Kabul, Afghanistan.

U.S. soldiers fired shots into an angry crowd and killed four people after a U.S. military vehicle crashed into civilian cars, prompting protests. In counterinsurgency warfare, a failure to distinguish civilians from the enemy has bedeviled most powerful armies fighting a shadow enemy in an unfamiliar country.

But more than three years into the Iraq war, and more than four years into the Afghanistan conflict, the U.S. military is still struggling to relearn a messy, frustrating and painfully slow form of warfare it had tried hard to forget after it emerged from the jungles of Vietnam.

"After Vietnam, the U.S. Army reacted to the threat of irregular warfare chiefly by saying `never again,'" wrote a group of counterinsurgency experts in a recent edition of Military Review, a journal published at Fort Leavenworth, Kan.

The teaching of counterinsurgency warfare "was leached from the various military college curricula, and the hard-won experience of a generation of officers was deliberately ignored," the authors wrote.

Compared with campaigns like the French war in Algeria and Russia's operation in Chechnya, the U.S.-led war in Iraq has been one of the least brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in recent memory.

Yet the longer a guerrilla campaign drags on, military experts say, the more brutality tends to increase. That is exactly what commanders in Iraq are concerned about now.

One of the authors of the Military Review article, Lt. Col. Conrad Crane, a retired Army officer, is leading a Pentagon effort to fashion a new counterinsurgency doctrine that will guide Army and Marine Corps training for future wars.

The doctrine, set to be completed this summer, comes years after the Pentagon began conducting a trial-and-error counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq that some argue has done more to alienate the Iraqi population and bolster the insurgency's ranks than it has to dry up the insurgency's base of support.

Immediately after the fall of Baghdad, the military's primary goal was to hunt down the top officials in Saddam Hussein's government -- the faces on the infamous deck of cards.

But the capture of senior government officials, including Hussein himself, failed to stop the attacks on U.S. troops and Iraqi civilians, and U.S. commanders adopted a more belligerent strategy in central Iraq. Entire villages were encircled with barbed wire, and commanders ordered extensive bombing raids on suspected insurgent hide-outs in Baghdad.

Convinced that this get-tough approach had backfired, Maj. Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marines began developing a new approach for his 1st Marine Division troops who were heading to Anbar province in 2004. What came to be called the "velvet glove" strategy emphasized patrolling hostile towns like Fallujah and Ramadi by foot and sending Marine platoons to live in Iraqi villages for extended periods to help U.S. troops get better intelligence about insurgents.

Mattis planned to do away with aerial bombing and artillery barrages.

Shortly after the Marines arrived in Anbar province, however, four U.S. contractors were savagely killed in Fallujah. That prompted the first major U.S. offensive in the city and signaled the end of Mattis' counterinsurgency strategy for the region.

Pentagon officials and military experts generally agree that it was not until the middle of last year that the U.S. civilian and military leadership in Iraq developed a coherent counterinsurgency plan.